alt Hacker Newsthis headline is a bit misleading on the first read, since it only affects functional (f)MRI, which is controversial since a longer time. a prominent example is the activity that has been detected in a dead salmon
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It's not that fMRI itself is controversial, it's that it is prone to statistical abuse unless you're careful in how you analyse the data. That's what the dead salmon study showed - some voxels will appear "active" purely by statistical chance, so without correction you will get spurious activations.
So, is fMRI like "fast" MRI? Can someone fill the rest of us mortals in on this? :)
If you apply enough gain and filtering to an unknown signal, eventually you'll pull something out of it that you can convince yourself is what you're looking for.
wondering why you are downvoted. You are right, though it's kind of inferred that the author means fMRI as the title focuses on brain activity only.
Structural MRI does not record brain activity, because it is, like, structural, not functional.
Structural MRI is even more abused, where people find "differences" between 2 groups with ridiculously small sample sizes.
The dead salmon was just a lesson in failing to correct for multiple comparisons.